"After the Civil war, there was an enormous burst of energy, a
desire to communicate, a desire to connect, with black people establishing
newspapers in any town, even tiny ones. It was their first opportunity to
use the written word without fear of reprisal."

-Phyl Garland- Journalist

The year 1827 marked the beginning of an era in which African Americans
would use the printed word as a means of political protest, when few other
outlets for black public expression were available. Before the Civil War,
newspapers in the North became a vital force in the antislavery movement;
after the war, black newspapers in both the North and the South helped to
forge cohesive communities of formerly enslaved African Americans. And
when, following Reconstruction, racist violence targeted African
Americans, the black press once again took up the mantle of political
activism.

The black press came to life in 1827, when a group of African American
New Yorkers, no longer able to tolerate constant denigration of the black
population in the pages of the mainstream press, pooled their resources to
found Freedom's Journal. John Russwurm and Samuel Cornish, the editors of
Freedom's Journal, proclaimed in their first issue that black Americans
would now have a means by which to "plead our own cause"; they
would no longer have to depend on white abolitionists to speak for them in
the white press. Freedom's Journal ceased publication after only two
years, but broke new ground both as an experiment in black
entrepreneurship and as the inaugural instrument for public expression by
African Americans where none had existed before.

Between 1827 and 1861, when the Civil War began, some two dozen
black-owned and -operated newspapers were founded in Northern cities. The
North Star, edited by Frederick Douglass, was the most influential. Its
readership included not only African Americans but also presidents and
members of Congress, who used the paper to keep abreast of the activities
of the antislavery movement. Under Douglassís visionary leadership, The
North Star firmly established the black press as an indispensable tool of
abolitionism. It would also provide a model for generations of black
political and social activism to come.

After the Civil War ended in 1865, emancipation from slavery sparked a
new wave of black newspapers -- and whole new reasons for them to exist.
Prior to emancipation, the black press could not publish or circulate its
papers in the slave states of the South. Further, under slavery, African
Americans had been barred from learning to read. With their newfound
access to education, African Americans strove to achieve literacy. They
embraced the newspapers as a sign of their freedom, and as a source of
information about their people and their communities. The black press of
the Reconstruction era dedicated itself to building communities of free
black men and women in both the North and South.

Reconstruction came to a close in 1876. President Rutherford B. Hayes
removed protections that had been extended to newly freed slaves,
unleashing a torrent of violence against African Americans. Between 1876
and 1919, at least 3,000 black men were murdered by white lynch mobs. The
Southern white press failed to condemn racist violence and even encouraged
the hatred that fueled the mobs. In response, black reporters made a
public record of crimes against African Americans that went unprosecuted
and unreported by the mainstream press, in order to inform their readers
about these new dangers. The black press also attempted to stem the tide
false accusations levied against black men by whites to justify the
actions of the lynch mobs. These efforts were not without risk. Ida B.
Wells, editor of the Memphis Free Speech, traveled throughout the South to
report on lynching. When a mob attacked her paperís office, Wells
realized that her life was in danger. Left with little choice but to flee
the South, she headed north and continued her career as a writer for the
New York Age.

In 1893, representatives of the black pressís ante-bellum roots and its
new radical leadership joined forces to protest the grievous lack of
African American participation in the Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
The exposition commemorated the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival
of Christopher Columbusís fleet on North American soil. It completely
omitted mention of black history and culture in the United States.
Frederick Douglass had been a journalist for almost fifty years. Ida B.
Wells was just emerging as one of the black pressís most prominent young
activist journalists. They co-wrote a pamphlet condemning the exposition
plannersí oversights. When the exposition acquiesced and hastily
organized Colored American Day, Wells boycotted the event but Douglass
attended and gave a rousing speech, one of the last of his long career. A
young man from Georgia named Robert S. Abbott was in the audience.
Thwarted by racism in his attempts to pursue careers in the printing trade
and in law, Abbott was inspired by Frederick Douglassís speech to enter
the field of journalism. His tenure as founding publisher of the Chicago
Defender is a subject of the next section.

Witnesses

Phyl Garland, journalist

James Grossman, historian

Vernon Jarrett, journalist

Christopher Reed, historian

Jane Rhodes, historian

Discussion Questions

What social and political factors contributed to the founding of the
ante-bellum black press in cities of the northern United States?

During Reconstruction, what changes led to the growing importance of
the black press in African American communities?

How did the black press in northern cities differ from the black press
in southern cities? Try to describe the conditions under which black
newspapers operated in the North and the South after the Civil War.

Consider that even in the free northern states, few African Americans
owned property, and that the privileges of citizenship, such as voting
rights, were denied to the black population. Under these conditions, what
role could the black press play in the political process?